


Dirty Laundry

by sundance830



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:45:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundance830/pseuds/sundance830
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did Aeryn end up wearing John's Calvins? Spoilers through "Rhapsody in Blue" in Season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirty Laundry

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a discussion on Facebook. : )

_Dirty little secrets_  
_Dirty little lies_  
 _…We love dirty laundry_

 

She didn’t realize that she had the Human’s underwear until she was hanging her clothes up to dry. She always took her wash back to her quarters to dry it, even though the others hung theirs in the sluice chamber. It was just another reminder of how she was different from the lesser species, the barbarians, the primitives. Just as the physical act of doing laundry was a reminder to her of what she had lost. On command carriers (and Leviathans), her laundry was done for her. She simply threw it into the hamper and a few days later clean clothes appeared, as if some sprite from a children’s story accomplished the task. Now that she was the one doing manual labor, she realized that there were beings who did this every day, as their job. Their only job. Most likely conscripted laborers or indentured slaves. There were many worlds that wanted Peacekeeper protection, but few who could afford the price. They paid their debt in labor and lives. The menial tasks that Sebaceans—Peacekeepers—wouldn’t do: sweeping, mopping, laundry, trash collection, ground maintenance. She never before questioned the cleanliness of the ships she was aboard or how, with thousands of Peacekeepers running around yet none of them picking up after themselves, it all functioned. She was starting to question a lot of things now.

The question became, how do you return the underwear? It seemed strangely intimate to take them to him or even to drop them off in his room. Perhaps the best way would be to bundle them with her other laundry and leave them in the amnexus fluid next time she washed her clothes, and he would find them when he did his laundry. Which is how she’d acquired them in the first place, they were in the bottom of the fluid. She liked that plan. As she folded them to put them away in her drawer, she stopped and held them, examined them. Would they smell like him? She gave a tentative sniff, but only smelled Moya’s amnexus fluid. They were similar to Peacekeeper-issue underwear, although those tended to be black. The material was different, softer. She snorted. An apt metaphor for the Human—he looked like a Sebacean, a Peacekeeper, but was definitely softer. The times that she’d been in close proximity to him (pressed against him as he worked to unstick her from the floor after an overprotective DRD assaulted her) or thrown against him (which seemed like whenever Moya lurched or starburst), she knew that he felt like a Sebacean. The front of the underwear had a flap that opened with snaps, hmm, yes, very similar to Peacekeeper underwear, although they did not have the fastenings. She flushed a little remembering her brief waking in the cell with Crichton while he was still unconscious and naked. Yes, so similar that she still thought him to be a Peacekeeper when she fully awoke. There were symbols on the back inside the waistband. She had seen the Earth alphabet on his notebook and his “dog tags” (after his explanation, she equated them with very primitive ident chips). She guessed that these symbols did not spell his name, there were too many to be his first name, and too few to be both names. They could be his last name, though. She tried to remember the order of the symbols on his dog tags. She finally decided that the symbols spelled the name of the underwear’s manufacturer, just as his module, flight suit, and recorder were stamped with his planet’s space program symbols. She realized she had been looking at the underwear for way too many microts. She finished putting them away and slammed her drawer with more force than was needed.

The underwear sat in her drawer for a few solar days and somehow was forgotten the next time she washed her clothes. She found them again a couple of weekens later. Now it seemed too late to take them back to the sluice chamber. She assumed he’d replaced them by now. He’d finally stopped wearing that baggy flight suit and was wearing clothes from the Peacekeeper supplies, so she knew he had found the stores on Moya’s upper tiers. She looked at the underwear again and ran her fingers over the seams. She felt like if she could understand their structure, how they were put together, maybe she could understand their owner in some small way. Would they feel different on her body than her Peacekeeper briefs? Warmer than Sebacean, like him? As if wearing them might give her insight into him. She became a little dizzy at the thought of putting them on. Which made her more determined to do it. She yanked off her pants and briefs and put on the underwear. No different in how they went on, one leg and then the other. They were too big for her, well he was bigger than her, and of course there was extra material in the front where she didn’t need it, but he would…she shook her head to clear the image of John wearing the underwear. It didn’t work. Frell this! She put on her pants and boots and headed out to do some maintenance on her prowler. Tech work she would’ve never done before, but was now forced by necessity to do. Secretly, she found the work satisfying and relaxing. And more importantly, she would need to focus on it.

She’d been working on the prowler for about an arn when she heard his footsteps. He was putting some parts from Moya into his module and he worked on it fairly often. What would he think if he knew she was wearing his underwear? Would it shock and amaze him as everything seemed to do? Or maybe excite him? Probably give him the wrong idea—or would it be the right one? She obviously needed to recreate (with him?) if this was the path her thoughts kept retreading. She couldn’t stop the twitching of the corners of her mouth as she tried not to smile. She felt like she had a secret joke, as if she was eight-cycles-old playing a game on the grassy field in one of the planetary terrain reconstructions.

John walked up beside her and poked his head into her work area. He was so frelling annoying. “Aeryn, you OK?”

“Yes, why?” she answered, still suppressing her smile.

“Well, you look like you might smile at any moment, which is something I don’t see very often. Or like the cat that swallowed the canary.” At her confused look, he explained, “Like you’re very satisfied with yourself.”

“Just thinking about something—a war game I used to play as a child.” It was partially true.

“Good times, learning to dominate the universe,“ he said, but it was softened by his smile.

“Yes, well, I think I’m done here.” She began to put her tools away. She would be too distracted to do any work with his non-stop talking (and nearness).

“Don’t leave on my account.”

“Crichton, don’t give yourself so much credit,” she replied, but found the retort didn’t have the bite that she’d intended. It sounded more like teasing. John just responded with a goofy grin as she finished cleaning up and left the maintenance bay.

***

She was dreaming of Velorek. All of a sudden she was jolted awake, but she was still disoriented. Dreams were new to her. If she dreamt on board the command carrier, she didn’t remember. She assumed something was put in soldiers’ food or drink to suppress dreaming, or at least the memory of it. She shook her head and tried to get her bearings. Moya must have just come out of starburst, which she knew wasn’t planned. She ought to get to command. She quickly pulled on her boots, not bothering to fasten them. It wasn’t until she was almost to her destination that she realized she was wearing the Human’s underwear. Well, frell. She couldn’t turn around and get pants now, she would be conspicuously late. And whatever was happening, she didn’t want decisions made without her.

She jogged the rest of the way to command with Zhaan close behind her. Everyone was in various states of dress and confusion. Pilot was informing them that he did not initiate nor terminate starburst. “Then who did?” she asked Pilot as she sat on one of the consoles.

“Moya,” Pilot answered.

The Dominar made some insulting comment about wives and ships, which, of course, the Human thought was impressive in some male-bonding way. She noticed that John was clad only in underwear and T-shirt (PK-issue), which she found disconcerting.

All of sudden John’s attention focused on her. She didn’t know if he realized that she was wearing his underwear, but she decided that she was not going to give them up easily--wait, when had she decided that? Whatever the reason, her best strategy was to pretend to be oblivious.

“That’s my underwear!” John said as he walked toward her pointing.

“What does this say?” she asked as she looked at the inside of the waistband, fairly certain that it wasn’t his name.

“Calvin.”

Well, that settled it. “Then they’re not yours.”

D’Argo chose that time to talk about dreaming of his wife, and John countered with his own example of dreaming of someone close to him.

She was definitely not going to talk about Velorek, so she gave the usual answer when asked by a fellow soldier about your night.

“I sleep soundly.”

Later on the planet, as John discovered she was carrying a weapon tucked into her waistband at the small of her back, his hand grazed the top of the underwear. She wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or not. Although, she did notice that he now seemed to be the one who looked like a “cat that swallowed a canary.” He probably figured out that she kept the underwear on purpose, knowing that they were his. But, this pair was now hers, even though she wasn’t sure why they seemed important to keep. She could examine those feelings later. Or fold them and put them away, just like her laundry.


End file.
